Monday, October 25, 2010

Rain, Rain, DON'T Go Away

I woke up this morning to a beautiful sight:

I have always loved the rain. I'm one of those people who don't bother with an umbrella, unless it's raining hard. I love the feel of rain on my face and on my hair. I am fortunate that it doesn't really mess up my hair, so it doesn't bother me to know that my hair is getting wet.

I don't own a raincoat or an umbrella. I did buy an expensive poncho when we went to France and never wore it. I wore it once on the Russia trip (though we had more than one day of rain). People are forever trying to make room for me under their umbrellas and, really, I do prefer to walk in the rain. (Just like you may have a refrigerator full of every soft drink and fruit juice imaginable, but my choice of drink really IS water. People find it difficult to believe me!)

Rainy days were always my favorite when I was growing up. We lived in a 5 room flat on a hill in San Francisco. There was a window seat in the bay window. Our TV sat in the middle of the seat, and there was plenty of room on either side to sit. I remember on rainy days that I would sit there and watch the rain cascading down Leavenworth Street to pool at the bottom of the hill.

Or I would watch pedestrians, bent at a sharp angle against the wind, struggling to keep an umbrella up as they headed to the top of the hill.

If I wasn't sitting on the window seat, I was curled up in the broken-down chair with a book. I have fond memories of that chair. It was dark purple and fuzzy...like a chair with a 5 o'clock shadow. It was oversized and the springs in the seat where sprung, but it just fit me and I could curl up in the chair, listen to the rain hitting the bay windows, and escape to Flushing, NY with The Black Stallion, or The Place with Albert Peyson Terhune and all of his collies.

One of the problems with living in a 2-story house is that even if you have a nice chair to curl up in, you miss the sound of the rain hitting the roof. Nothing more wonderful than cuddling under a nice duvet and listening to the sound of rain on the roof.

When I was in Australia we would have torrential rains that lasted for a very brief period of time. Peggy had a pergola over her patio and I remember standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night listening to the rain pounding down on the pergola and smelling the clean smell of the rain washing all the dust out of the air.

Rain is also the gift that keeps on giving. If you're lucky and live in the right places (like Hawaii, for example), the end of the rain might bring sun and with it those beautiful rainbows (and we all know that somewhere over the rainbow there's a land that we've heard of once in a lullabye).

If you live in a place like California, what usually follows the rain is a grey day...but when you wake up the next morning, everything is washed clean, the air smells wonderful, and if the sun is out, you really want to drive to San Francisco because after a rain, San Francisco is always its most beautiful.